In Australia the experience of works of art through mechanical reproduction always precedes their direct experience…The image has become the site of a transient fascination that represents not the unity of one ego but a multiple subjective view…Australia is already the landscape of the future…

Imants Tillers, “In Perpetual Mourning”¹

NEGATIVE HISTORY

Drawing on analogies and models from linguistic theory and the sciences, it is possible to extend Tillers’ characterization of Australian art and its international relation as the province of the “living dead'' into a paradigm of “negative history”. The vacuity of the myth of “origins” which fixates on the landscape in Australian art is exposed in Tillers’ recent works by the overlaying of other nationalistic “earth” fetishes across the conventional Australian obsession. Most effectively Tillers cross-refers to Kiefer’s ambiguous investigations in Heart of the Wood, 1985 and in Lost, Lost, Lost, 1985. In The Decentred Self, 1985, Tillers denies the validity of the search for “difference” between the art of “centre” and “provincance” and implies, instead, that the quest is a spiral leading to a dead-end, to an irreconcilable contradiction which artis belonging to a country late in establishing a “history” within the impacted meanings and time-scales of international capitalism cannot resolve. Knowledge is no longer available. It is nailed away out of sight from the once omniscient, integrated Subject-Deity. Within Australian art no visionary possibilities exist such as the myth of exotic “otherness” would predicate of it. 

it seems that at some moment each succeeding generation of artists in Australia expresses the sentiment “Australia is now part of the art-scene”, only to later recognize their hopeless invisibility and powerlessness.²

Nonetheless, official bodies relentless negotiate predetermined international interchanges presuming to illuminate and, indeed, promote what TIllers defines as: 

a relentless provincialism…marked by the tensions between two antithetical positions: a defiant urge to localism…and a reluctant recognition that the generative innovations in art…are determined externally. 

Even when Australian art finds itself “in the vanguard” by default in its enforced reliance on illustration and the second-hand image (in the terms of “post-Modern” memesis), Tillers can only draw a negative consequence for it: 

For once the call from the other side of the world is congruent with our real cultural condition… By employing strategies of mimicry, deconstruction and even hyper-conformism, “invisibility” and “powerlessness” can now be turned to our advantage. With this realisation we are also witnessing an inversion of the normal patterns of art-production in Australia rooted as they are in low self-esteem. The shift is from the hitherto pervasive condition of “anorexia nervosa” (i.e. small, tentative, self-effacing and ultimately self-destructive outputs) to a condition resembling “bulimia” (binge-eating and vomit.) in the latter case, we see this as an over-excessive consumption of images and their regurgitation.³ 

The centre-province paradigm framed in such pessimism can hardly be developed further with any profit. Official consensus on the advantages of overseas contact results in the shunting of artefacts around the globe and in their calculated deposition in elected spectacles such as Venice. 

MISSING BAGGAGE

It is less interesting to examine such points of contact than it is to look at what could be called the “negative interactions”, namely, at the interstices and the break in the pattern of links with overseas art. The significance of int­erconnection lies in the missing baggage of a premised in­ter-cultural exchange and In the Information badly diges­ted In transit. It is critical to examine the “quantum” gaps, the jumps In the stages of transformation form one cultural context to another. In terms of TIllers' own work, it is the joins between the canvas board which cause certain data to miscarry. They fragment the planes and spaces across which myth operates. Exactly what Is it that falls out in the juxtapositions? A model can be constructed based on the positing of indeterminacy and complementarity In the acausality of micro-physics, in tracks of action, reac­tion and transformation. 

The consequence of drawing on such analogies is that one particular fallacy, resurrected as the theme of the latest Sydney Biennale, that of origin, drops out (whether In the context of historical causality or of thematic orienta­tion). “The Australian situation” can be projected either as a pessimistic “state of dislocation” as In Tillers' analysis, or it can be more positively conceived from the view of a Deleuzlan “multiplicity”, a transformational configuration. In either case, in such an inconstant formation, it is hardly possible to speak of “origins” or causalities. Lines of flight may be noted, but no originative causes and only statisti­cal possibilities of determining effects. Effectively, deter­minacy and causality are separated from each other since the very conditions of international exchange make it impossible to locate “cause”. 

One floats a prediction which originates where? If the self is fragmented, then to where can it in turn be orientated? The exit is anywhere. Origin and destination in post­modernism, and in Australian art, are forever unknown. There is no hope of characterizing a situation, a persona; there is no hope of structuring an identity which will not slip away and transform into another presence. The terms of the conventional “centre-province” debate must be put away since the dislocation of international relations makes it impossible to determine “difference” at all. In the rela­tion of two opposing terms polemically, a break occurs, a jump in which the entity finds itself occupying the position of the opposite pole. There can be no god-like transcen­dental subject who projects a grid of order onto things. In the terms of space-time interchange, the subject who once controlled the experiment is now written into the quantum equation of interaction. At any time it becomes one with the object of its study. The theoretician falls into and impacts with the theory by the very conditions of both language and spatial movement. 

It is in the breaks, or in the fissures of Tillers' work that iden­tity exists as an absolute. “identity” is an unknown quantum which can be tracked but not defined and localized. 

At an airport the whole globe appears in complex seductive relationships to itself, the erotic differences at play always merging into the homogeneous scene where really only one language is spoken: Wieviel kostet? C’est combien? How much? Quanto?... Between arrival and departure, the familiar and the strange, the real and the imaginary, the model and its image, there is just  you at an airport, trying to locate your interlocutor, and the wind beyond the plate-glass walls… At an airport, the only directions are In and Out, not Up and Down. At an airport you are neither Here nor There only Now.⁴

At the interstices of two multiplicities is absolute security. The necessity to continually self-Identify is absolved. Here where there is no determinacy, absolute potential has power because it is, as yet undefined. Choices have not yet been perceived as conflicts. To travel is better than to arrive; arrival enforces self-definition, the pattern, the regime of the Symbolic. Once restructured into another enclosed form, an artwork, fluid and changeful by nature, becomes another artefact in the musty galleries of the world museum, labelled in the stratifications and hierar­chies of yet another rigidly thematized international Biennale. 

FROM ICARUS TO THE PHOENIX

The Biennale has been conceived in the great hope that our fin-de-siecle can, like that one lying at the base of modernism, represent a new beginning rather than an end…this exhibition represents the potential for a moment of crucial alteration.. Younger and less secure artistic heritages such as ours, where the creative force is still relatively untended can too easily be diverted from the  necessary paths of self-discovery and self-expression and moved towards over-refinement and academicism by correspondence course with such sophistications… Australia instead should be regarding itself as a seer for the creative future and should take full cognizance of its own experience in order to achieve this.⁵

Such an analysis is based on a misunderstanding of the es­sential ethics of post-modernism which is radically different from curatorial messianism. Forms are not strangled into tight structures, but rather identity is abandoned in order to move and change. Kafka stalks those who fail to know the law. Better to stay outside the castle gate to avoid the risk of transgression which accompanies gallery labels and definitive catalogue entries. The only ones who dread the castle dungeon but still want to enter are those who quest form itself and posit security as the prerogative solely of a located structure. Transformation, however, is on the out­side in the lines of flight of the nomads. This is the potential strength of Australian art- provided that the provincialism fallacy of the official apologetic is circumnavigated. 

The manner in which “official” Australian culture is lum­bered overseas, let alone the receival of weighty interna­tional cargoes here, leads not only to stereotypes of the sort feared by Nick Waterlow, but, worse, it leads to the very thing which he is advocating in place of the stereotype, that is, history. “Interchange” is itself a fallacy when it is understood to be the careful pre-determining in advance of what will be the object of the pre-arranged spectacle; what it is which will be transported. Effects are never predictable in this simplistic manner, which is just as well considering the severe reductionism of the apologia for exported Australian cultural artefacts. 

“Culture”, however that is to be defined, is not control­lable. Always something gets lost, something gets diverted in transit, the codes are displaced, dislocated, reversed on themselves, as Tillers so appositely demonstrates. But this is not necessarily a cause for pessimism. The effects of dis­location are innocent, the random result of chance con­nections. Within this unmediated cross-intervention it is ir­relevant to castigate one culture with pollution of another since both change by such contact. Control is the fallacy which tries to determine that the stasis will remain as quo ante. Control is the danger, a “rigor mortis”, not the lines of flight along which cultures and histories uncontrollably in­teract. The horror of the situation lies in the willing to determine the outcome. This is what both the Sydney and Venice Biennales of 1986 were aiming at, hence the supremely artificial “tightness” of their agendas. Works bizarre in their very distinction from each other, intersecting in a complexity of subtle minutiae, were all located under sonorous titles culled from the main-line orthodoxy of Wes­tern history of super and sub-terranean science, advan­cement and hierarchically specific symbolism.

Post-modernity is always viewed through the glass of fin de-siecle by those who enter the field of artistic creativity under the privilege of structure and control. The optimism of post-modernity, on the other hand, lies in the innocence of the absent cause relations, in the impossibility of predic­tion, in the unknown and, thus, uncontrollable jump from one state into another, in the certainty of change and recoil just to the left of centre. 

IMAGE MOVEMENT

It is true that it is tempting to adopt a passivity of indif­ference within the post-modern stance. In fact, the lines of flight enforce their own ethic and action which is that of perpetual change and motion. Choices still have to be made, although the consequences are not available to preview. This requires a rigorous act of self-discipline akin to, at least, the desk-bound tedium of Tillers’ working-method, an ascetic renunciation of gesture. Alertness and not a little courage are demanded since causality is no longer in effect in the flow of a constantly transforming multiplicity. This act of surrender is neither indifferent, nor passive, nor egotistical dandyism. 

More dynamic paradigms are needed, which would in­corporate transformational flows in place of the more rigid theoretical grids concerning the transfer of data across cultures. A fluid paradigm for the analysis of the effects of illustration on Australian art is woefully lacking. Noted cases have been recorded but a methodological account which would accommodate random changes is essential. This could be created on the model of micro-physical theory as in Schrödinger and Dirac's law of propagation concerning the “psi-function”. The peculiarity of this equa­tion is that it accommodates random changes without fal­sifying the convention of classical mathematical proofs. This is a statistical mechanics and it determines nothing concerning the structural location of physical objects, like small particles, but only the probability of their ap­pearance.⁶

For example, in the case of Australian painting of the eighties, there are cases of illustration/mimesis which are far less overt than Tillers' conscious polemicizing, but which are also operative within the locus of “the Australian landscape” as an index of “identity”. The effect of illustra­tion on the artists under consideration took a highly specific form. It was first noticeable at the 1984 Exxon In­ternational Exhibition, Australian Visions, designed to be viewed in the United States (being shown first at the Gug­genheim, New York) and, as a result, hyper-consciously presenting cultural baggage to “the Other”. These artists have continued to work along the same nexus since then, some exhibiting also at two Sydney Biennales in which this issue was not noted. 

Almost word for word, some of the essays in the catalogue of Australian Visions reiterate the generative function of the landscape for national art-forms in the same manner as had earlier essays for overseas touring-exhibitions of the sixties and seventies. Diane Waldman “reacts” the works for their American audience as a: 

current resurgence of figurative and landscape painting in Australia (which) can be attributed to a new awareness of and pride in native tradition… By revivifying their traditions, the younger Australians are able to make an original contribution to the ongoing international dialogue on art… a directness, a powerful emotive sensibility that finds expression in an intense pathos or humor, a sense of melodrama, a raw energy, a rude sense of color and form and finally an awkwardness that is both uncomfortable and reassuring in its vitality and affirmation of feeling. 

Memory Holloway, initially at least, intends to short-circuit such an interpretation: 

for many contemporary artists picturing the landscape is no longer an essential point of departure for self-definition, nor is it any longer the primary component in constructing the national identity. 

In spite of her caution, the parameters of the whole curatorial intention of the exhibition force her back onto a nexus tying the art to the land, at least as “backdrop” or “witness” of the multifarious subjectivities projected in front of it. (How else to understand the presence of the om­nivorous Peter Booth oils which are in such thematic dis­placement in the context of the other works?) The origin of identity remains the landscape and the far more elusive actual relationship of Australian images to those of the Northern hemispherical “centres” remains unread. The im­position of a master theme, landscape, is an ideologically safer unificatory point for what are disparate visions than an examination of the semiosis of the transfer of vision it­self.

The encouragement in the essays is to read the art-works as single statements, framed, contained, consisting of good, solid, well-loaded paint on large canvases of a definite presence and locatable boundaries, just bursting with “local” colour, idiosyncrasy and exotica, much like the first exhibition of Australian art sent overseas in the fifties. However, looking again at the exhibition through the jaundiced eye of Tillers' recent Venice works, an elusive curious displacement may be noted which reads like a slipping signifier in a chain of transference from location to location. In terms of Tillers-speak, are the works of Susan Norrie, in particular, isolated particularized works? More recent exhibitions still would claim for her paintings the status of the self-contained oil with individual aura, for ex­ample, her Vanity Unit in the Sydney Biennale, or her two Untitled works of 1986 from Tall tales and true in the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, exhibition, The Gothic: Perversity and its Pleasure, which still placed her within the same melodramatic context as did Waldman's essay of 1984, that is, of sensibility and severe eccentricity. 

Another in the Exxon exhibition who raised the question of exactly what the viewer was examining was Mandy Mar­tin. Her more recent works shown in 1986 at Milburn Gal­lery, Brisbane, and in Adelaide, still display a highly par­ticularized relationship with magazine illustration. The same might be said also for the work of Jan Murray, Dale Frank and some of Peter Booth's large oils since the late seventies. 

What is occurring is more than a case of “quotation”, which is the dominant concern of Tillers' canvas-boards. it is true that in the case of the post-modernist painting one always in expecting quotation of “codes”. One dutifully expects that one will have to look at any painting of the eighties, which has any pretensions to topicality, with one eye blinded, through a fuzz of other works sliding across it. However, the work of the Exxon artists is based less on the original referants in the actual images which others painted elsewhere, or just on magazine illustrations of those works, rather the nexus is with magazine illustrations of the details of original works. It is the dislocated close-ups which “ghost” Mandy Martin’s Formation II, 1983, and Phalanx, 1984, or Norrie’s, After the Dance, 1983

A part of a total image, reduced, isolated within a body of text (the totality may, or may not, be given within the ar­ticle) is placed against other dislocated details. In Susan Norrie's works and, especially, in some of Mandy Martin's floating geometries, not so much a code is quoted, as an uncontrollably selected part of the code. 

It is equivalent to what Roland Barthes was seeking as the effect of the “filmic” which can be seen, paradoxically, only in the still image of the film. In other words, it is the interstices, the joins, the breaks, the gaps, which are the condensation points, or locus, of the essential of a code, or form, or of a multiplicity. Gilles Deleuze Image-Mouvement, basing himself on Bergson, whose notions were integrally related to developments in the physical and mathematical concepts of indeterminacy, conceives of the film as a sequence of mobile cuts, rather than an irreducibly structured entity. There are congruences bet­ween such filmic theories and the condition of Australian post-modernist painting. 

One stands too close to Norrie's and Martin's works. In fact, one stands nowhere at all. One is not in the work, ab­sorbed, for the self-conscious, post-modernist quotation rejects that illusion of empathetic entry of a work. Instead, it is claustrophobia, squeezed in somehow between one page of a book and another, this screen and that screen. It Is not that the forms are constricted by their boundaries or are “too big”. More subtly, one looks at the edges of the works expecting extensions of those circumferences. 

The size of the brush-work and the heavy impasto, also, are less the vaunted “expressionism” of the Australian landscape, than an effect of a much smaller area blown-­up disproportionately. (Some of Susan Norrie's “gestures” in her Untitled, 1986, works are two feet across.) Although it would be far too severely reductionist to construe Norrie's and Martin's works as close-ups of “another work some­where else”, other expressive or conceptual factors are undoubtedly significant, nonetheless, it is also critical that emphasis not be placed entirely on subject-matter and hyper-conscious intentions while ignoring the obvious con­structional effects of a certain mode of perceiving the art of overseas. In terms of negative history, these spaces and gaps intercutting the texture of the painting produced in Australia are significant indicators of the polemic of inter­change, more so than the study of the deposits of trace­able cause and effect structures. 

Accidental mobility is a positive factor In history. The unin­tentional is the creative factor and a highly positive one, as in the cases of Mandy Martin and Susan Norrie, against Tillers’ pessimism of magnificence. The creative is certainly not the pondered and mythic which official institutions cannot stop themselves forever resurrecting and peddling abroad as Australia’s official cultural condition, that super-self-conscious localism set against the alien.